Wrist Tweets is now free & open source

So Google has just announced Android Wear, which will provide some type of ‘official’ support for Android smart watches. This reminded me of something I have wanted to do for a little while … release Wrist Tweets, my Sony LiveView Twitter app, as open source ! Many thanks to everyone who bought the paid version. It didn’t really make much money, but it was fun and rewarding to develop (it covered the cost of buying a Sony LiveView, but not much more). I’ll keep it alive as long as practical with any easy bugfixes, but no promises. If you are one of the handful of people that bought it this year, I’m more than happy to sort out some kind of refund.

Some history: The original Sony LiveView had a very similar purpose to Android Wear devices, and Sony provided their own open source SDK to allow notifications to be pushed to the LiveView ’microdisplay’. The hardware implementation wasn’t all that great though – battery life of the device was poor, it was plagued with Bluetooth connection issues and the design inexplicably didn’t allow charging without removing the band, along with a whole bunch of other usability issues I won’t bore you with. No idea if these were fixed for the “Sony Smartwatch 2” or whatever they called it, since after my experience with the LiveView, I decided to leave smartwatches alone until they matured a little. Hopefully Google and their partner manufacturers get it right with the Moto360 and future Android Wearables …